Live from the West Wing: President Obama goes prime time

The uphill fight to get Congress to approve a military strike on Syria is pushing President Barack Obama to embrace a brand of communication he’s long resisted: the delivery of a prime-time address to the nation from the White House.

During his nearly five years in office, Obama has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid high-stakes, nighttime White House speeches. His advisers have repeatedly denigrated the value of Oval Office addresses, accusing promoters of such talks as being out of touch with modern media realities.

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Now the president is preparing to deliver precisely such a high-profile address Tuesday night, giving in to pressure from lawmakers demanding a no-holds-barred White House effort to sell the public on the wisdom of a military response to Syria’s alleged chemical weapons use. And so a president who surged into the White House in no small part on the strength of his communication skills will need to turn in a particularly effective performance in a format that’s never been among his most favored.

“I doubt the White House really believes in this moment that an Oval Office or White House address will be transformative, but they need to use everything in their arsenal, including sheer repetition,” said Jeff Shesol, a top speechwriter for President Bill Clinton.

“If you’re asking members of Congress to get out on a limb and do something their constituents don’t want them to do, then it means you have to try it…I don’t think anyone believes in the mystical power of an Oval Office address or prime-time address. That power has been diminishing for a long time.”

Former Obama speechwriting director Jon Favreau acknowledged that the White House has traditionally been eager to get the president out of the Oval Office to deliver speeches and in front of an audience wherever possible, but said this situation calls for a solo appearance.

“We have been reluctant to do the Oval,” Favreau said in an interview. “I think this president is at his best when he’s feeding off a crowd and has got an audience in front of him, but I think this is a different case…To do something like this in front of a crowd — that seems political. The Oval becomes the best option.”

Obama aides haven’t said exactly where in the White House the president will speak from Tuesday. In a Twitter exchange earlier this summer, a top Obama aide suggested Oval Office addresses aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

“This is an argument from the 80s,” Obama senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer wrote during a back-and-forth about the prospect of a big speech on revelations about National Security Agency surveillance. “Ovals reach abt 1/3 the audience they did when Reagan did them.”

However, Pfeiffer told POLITICO Saturday that he wasn’t declaring Oval Office speeches worthless, just asking people to be realistic about their power.

“The point is that a nationally televised address is still the most powerful tool in the toolbox, but the audience size is greatly diminshed as media has changed. It is still a part of a strategy as opposed to a strategy in and of itself,” Pfeiffer said. “I was just pushing back against the idea that a national address meant the whole country heard what you had to say. It’s a tiny fraction nowadays. But that’s very different than being against them.”

Some experts agree the mystique of the Oval Office address is tired, and showing its age.

“In general, they’ve lost their wallop in terms of unifying the country around the strong voice of the commander in chief,” said Doug Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “People that were going to watch that on TV probably will now channel surf to a cable show or sports or something else…When it was the big three [networks], you didn’t have that luxury. It was shut off the TV or listen to the president.”

If Obama does turn to the Oval Office for Tuesday night’s speech — and officials so far have said only that he will speak from somewhere in the White House — it will be a true rarity. As president, he has delivered only two addresses to the nation from his office, both in 2010: a speech about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and another about the end of combat in Iraq.

“I personally have never loved the Oval,” Favreau added. “But I actually think it’s pretty right for this one.”

A more popular choice for high-wattage Obama White House speeches has been the East Room — where he announced the death of Osama bin Laden — which allows for a presidential walk to the podium and for an audience when desired, or the Cross Hall, which can allow the president to be flanked by advisors.

“You see the president in action, but when the president’s in the Oval Office he’s just sitting at his desk,” said Martha Kumar, a Towson University professor who has spent decades studying presidents’ communications operations. “Sometimes the desk looks like it’s about to swallow up a president.”

But Kumar noted that presidents have used the Oval Office before to announce limited military actions of the kind the Obama White House says it has in mind for Syria.